Commercial airbeds have been growing steadily in popularity. Many types of airbeds have been developed for a variety of applications over the years, ranging from simple and inexpensive airbeds that are convenient for temporary use (such as for house guests and on camping trips), home-use airbeds that replace conventional mattresses in the home, to highly sophisticated medical airbeds with special applications (such as preventing bedsores for immobile patients). With respect to home-use and medical airbeds, more and more consumers are turning to these types of airbeds for the flexibility in firmness that they offer, allowing consumers to adjust their mattresses to best suit their preferences.
Conventional control systems for these commercial airbeds have generally been imprecise and subject to a certain degree of inaccuracy. To avoid this problem, certain systems rely on an arbitrary number scale where a user simply chooses numbers and adjusts that number according to the user's needs to change the pressure within the mattress chamber. Other systems merely use large pressure increments (e.g. only allowing a consumer to choose pressure settings at increments of 0.05 psi) to hide the inability of the system to achieve more precise target pressures. Furthermore, with respect to deflating a mattress in particular, achieving a target pressure may take an undesirably large amount of time (e.g. up to around five minutes or more).
Given the deficiencies of the existing technology, it is an object underlying certain embodiments of the described principles to provide a system and method for controlling the inflation and deflation of an air mattress to quickly and accurately achieve user-inputted target pressures. However, while this is an object underlying certain embodiments of the invention, it will be appreciated that the invention is not limited to systems that solve the problems noted herein. Moreover, the inventors have created the above body of information for the convenience of the reader; the foregoing is a discussion of problems discovered and/or appreciated by the inventors, and is not an attempt to review or catalog the prior art.